koan

My little Countdown Timer application is in need of serious attention - there are a number of features I want to add to it, so I thought it would be a good point to do a new release and draw a line under the current form.

That means a new build for Zaurus (Sharp ROM) and also a Linux x86 AppImage added to the Mac and Windows builds. The only visible difference is I added an "overrun" feature: sometimes you want to count down to an event but keep the timer running so you can see how much time passed since the alarm.

The Zaurus version runs everything in a single thread so if you choose a long sample as the alarm sound then the overrun time won't be very accurate - one of the reasons why the code needs a serious re-write.

Recently I have been working on ZBedic because I wanted to update it and port it to Qt 5 so I can use it on my desktop. Long story short, porting it was too much hassle so I started a clean implementation. That project is called Frasmodic.

I think it won't be possible to build a Qt 5 version on Zaurus so the best thing to do is to try to update ZBedic. For example, libbedic is statically linked. I can make some improvements to it then build a dynamically linked ZBedic. However, the question is who would use it ? I don't see so many people posting on here saying they are using Sharp ROM and the majority of users seem to use zalarm without GUI (is that correct ?)

I also noticed from web history that someone generated a Japanese-English dictionary from EDICT where they mixed kana and kanji keywords together in the index. I have been generating similar dictionary files myself but I separated the kana and kanji versions. Having a combined index seems very sensible, I think I can adapt my scripts so that is also in my plans.

Some of my other dictionary files can be improved so I will try to get onto that task in the future. I am also curious about converting FreeDict dictionaries to bedic format, or supporting that format directly.

Finally, I am playing with the idea of porting Kanji Nirvana to desktop. I have been poking around the source; it seems doable but I have no idea about a time frame for it.